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Marginally Productive

All the unremarkable thoughts the margins were too small to contain.

Posted on 05/14/2019 by Sam Ashworth-Hayes

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That upstart crow.

“for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you…”

Robert Greene,Greene’s Groats-Worth of Wit, 1592

William Shakespeare has been dead for 400 years and more, and still his work haunts our betters. It reminds them, constantly, that the greatest writer of his time and since was not one of them. It reminds them that an outsider – a man without the benefits of a university education, or fine breeding – took on the gentry in their art of choice, and proved immeasurably their superior.

Some have refused to accept this, preferring instead to take refuge in denial. They raise high the standard of the ‘authorship question’ and claim Shakespeare for their own, attributing his work to the Earl of Oxford or Derby, or to some other suitable knight of the realm. They look for an author who provides for a more palatable past, a safe shelter from the bubble-pricking reality that a grammar school boy really could write that well.

Less obviously explicable is the re-emergence of this behaviour among the new elite, the adoption by meritocrats of their hierarchist predecessors’ cause. Their latest effort to explain away Shakespeare’s authorship is a classic of its genre. It could almost have been drawn from the notes of a 19th century theorist. The proposed candidate is, of course, an aristocrat. Someone well-educated. Who moved in the right circles. Who had the right upbringing.

Where this theory departs from the old — and nods to the social beliefs of the new — is in its selection of a candidate who was “a dark-skinned Jewish woman”1 . A candidate who stares across from the 16th century, and reflects back at us the features of our modern day demography.

It is in our nature to want to see ourselves within people we admire. Both groups of ‘questioners’ are moved by the same motivating force: they wish to see the author of Othello and King Lear as somehow one of their own. And on its own, fantasising of this sort is of very little consequence — the result of narrative thinkers overfitting theories that explain every quirk within a life, rather than accepting that reality does not always present us with neatly ordered stories.

But it is hard to shake the feeling that, underlying everything else, is a less worthy motivation. That rather than a longing for Shakespeare to have been one of us, it is driven more by a pointed desire that he not have been one of them.

So much of the ‘authorship question’ is bound up in rotten assumptions: that to be uneducated is to be unintelligent, and that to be lower class is to be uncultured. Left standing, Shakespeare demonstrates their essential falsehood. He forces those who hold them to confront their beliefs about where talent may come from, and where merit is found.

By claiming him as their own, the questioners rid themselves of this source of doubt. The ‘authorship question’ affirms their moral, cultural, and intellectual superiority over those below them in the hierarchy. And to the extent that the it does so, it is far from harmless.

Header image courtesy of ufopilot, used under a Creative Commons license.

Posted on 04/15/2019 by Sam Ashworth-Hayes

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Embers

In the opening of his series Civilisation, Kenneth Clark stands on a river bank across from Notre Dame and addresses the watching audience. “What is civilisation?” he asks. “I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms yet. But I think I can recognise it when I see it”. Turning, he considers the cathedral before adding “And I’m looking at it now”.

It is difficult not to wonder what Clark would have seen in the smoke and embers settling in its place today. I suspect that we know what the answer is; that civilisation is not simply the sum of art and architecture left to us by our ancestors, but an intellectual and cultural inheritance into which we are initiated throughout our lives. You cannot burn it to the ground, because it is not bound up in bricks. It is, as Oakeshott says, the “stock of emotions, beliefs, images, ideas, manners of thinking, languages, skills, practices, and manners of of activity” from which “these ‘things’ are generated”.

The loss of Notre Dame diminishes us all, but it is not the first such fire and it will not be the last. Civilisation continues, divorced from the physical; “what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal”. It is there, solid and immovable, resisting every coming and going.

Until, of course, it is not.

The dynamics of norms are deeply curious. They exist in a web of expectations and actions, self-enforcing, evolving without direction, responding slowly even to great external strain. But when they do begin to move, these same forces result in rapid shifts to a new and sometimes unpredictable equilibrium.

The combined structure of values, norms, and ideas – expectations about what we owe to one another, and what how we should and will act – in any age seems as though it will last forever. It was unthinkable that Rome would fall, until it did. It was unthinkable that the Church would split, until it did. It was unthinkable that – well. You see the line of argument; simply because it is not physical does not mean that this cultural inheritance will last forever, or that our neglect cannot damage it.

This is not an argument for stasis; every society changes, and often for the better. But there is within these changes a thread of continuity; unless a culture is completely replaced, something of it will pass into the next step in the chain. What I wonder, looking at the smoke pouring from Notre Dame, is how much has passed from our own history to us.

Set aside the dramatic changes in population that have resulted from an era of mass migration. It is not possible to argue that these flows of people bring cultural benefits without noting that they also bring cultural change, but set them aside nonetheless; managed well, migration is no cause for alarm. Set aside also the dramatic rise in secularism – culminating in a nation where more than half of all “Christians” do not believe in the risen Christ.

Instead, consider the creeping rationalism which insists that no habit of being handed down through time is worthwhile; that a sufficiently clever design can replace without consequence something that has evolved over long periods, that the past is simply a legacy of brutality and ignorance. The mindset adopted by the educators and politicians, the writers and historians who are entrusted with the safeguarding and reproduction of our cultural heritage. The people – as Clark described them – who wonder “if civilization is worth preserving”; who wish to shift to a global perspective of history, deny the concept of a West as anything other than a target for rote condemnation, who wish to decolonise the curriculum of an uncolonised nation.

We have become civilisational secularists. We divorce our education, and state, and modes of life from our past. We believe that nations are little more than a collection of people who happen to live in the same place; there is no expectation that these people should have anything more than a vague list of values in common. The idea that they should share a common culture is viewed as a backward relic, and the idea that you might attempt to preserve any such by limiting change the result of some reptilian process of the hindbrain.

What this worldview misses is the value in continuity. In preserving a shared culture through which we can relate to one another. In recognising, like Chesterton, that unless you can explain why a thing might be a certain way, you should act with caution in changing it. In accepting as Oakeshott does that “learning to make something of ourselves in no context in particular is an impossibility”; that our culture is not simply a set of constraints on our actions, but something which shapes our preferences and modes of thinking. And that if you begin the task of writing your civilisation anew, what you create will not necessarily be better than what went before.

Looking at Notre Dame, Clark said, it seemed “hard to believe that European civilization could ever vanish”. And yet it had already happened once.

Header image courtesy of Olivierbxl, used under a Creative Commons license.

Posted on 11/09/2018 by Sam Ashworth-Hayes

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Rhetorical Contagion (Britain is not America)

British politicians, I suspect, feel a degree of envy towards their American counterparts. An MP who proceeds along the time-honoured route through Eton and Oxford to the Palace of Westminster will spend most of their lives surrounded by the same sort of people in the same sort of architecture, and eating the same sort of curious canteen food.

American politics is different. It is glamorous; senators and congressman wheel and deal across our TV screens. It is expensive; money pours into campaigns seemingly (and legally) without limit. It is high stakes and high powered. And best of all, the Americans very rarely have to field questions about the punctuality of the fortnightly bin collections in Upton Snodsbury, or take to the stage with a candidate wearing a bucket on his head.

It’s probably unsurprising then that some British politicians seem to make strenuous efforts to make their lives more American, at least as far as the trappings of power go. They hold televised debates and fix the dates of elections long in advance, bringing in the long campaign trail common to American politics. They hire American campaign gurus like David Axelrod and Jim Messina. Backbench MPs appoint chiefs of staff. And, of course, ministers like Boris Johnson make pointed comments about wanting their own government plane.

Longing for the glamour and accoutrements of American politics is fine so far as it goes. It might be crass and even slightly embarrassing to see our politicians cosplaying their cross-channel counterparts, but it isn’t actively harmful. The obsession with American political argument is.

For all our shared heritage and all the similarities, Britain and America are still very different countries. Our Prime Minister is not a President. There is a totally different set of powers accruing to the position. Our highest court – however American in name – is appointed and functions in a way utterly unlike it’s US counterpart. Our devolution of powers is unlike theirs. We do not have a written constitution, but instead a web of documents and norms and pieces of legislation that come together into a system that functions so long as you don’t look at it too closely.

We do not share the same fraught history around issues of race. We do not share their demographic make-up. We have a very different set of values on environmental issues. On social issues. On economic issues. We already have single-payer healthcare, government caps on tuition fees, subsidised loans for poor students, generous maternity and holiday allowances.

Many of the battles the Americans are fighting, in short, are on political terrain utterly alien to us. They take as read the various powers of the different American branches of government, the political and social history of the nation, the mood of the population towards the issue. They are, in other words, just the tip of an enormous iceberg, resting upon a vast mass of assumed knowledge and context and fact. And if you immerse yourselves in these arguments and then deploy them in Britain, you do so on foundations of thin air. The assumptions that underpin them are gone.

Political ideals may be universal, but contexts are definitely not. We would probably agree with Americans that it is a good idea to drive on the right side of the road. It’s just that by right, we mean left. The action which best achieves an ideal is dependent on where you stand – and so will the arguments you make.

This rhetorical contagion is where Britain’s cultural obsession with America becomes unhealthy. When British politicos spend their time thinking and reading and arguing about American policy, then it is all but inevitable that this begins to shape their thinking on British issues. American rhetoric is adopted and employed in an environment with which it is fundamentally at odds. And are all the poorer for it.

Header image courtesy of ehpien, used under a creative commons license.

Posted on 11/07/2018 by Sam Ashworth-Hayes

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How bad politicians drive out the good

One of the best known laws of economics is that bad money drives out good. If a country debases its coinage, mixing the gold and silver in new coins with lower value metals, people will hold onto the older and more valuable coins and spend the new ones. The bad money flushes the ‘good’ money from circulation. As Britain prepares to leave the European Union with its weakest crop of parliamentarians for decades, it’s worth wondering whether a similar principle might apply in politics.

The application of this law to elections could be termed a cycle of mediocrity – or possibly a ‘Chris Grayling spiral’, and it goes something like this. Becoming an MP is objectively a bad career choice for top talents. The pay, while generous, is nowhere near what they might earn in business or finance. Opportunities to add on high-paying consultancies or newspaper columns, before or after serving in Parliament, accrue only to a lucky few.

Moreover, becoming an MP costs a small fortune in time and money. In 2014, you could expect to drop a neat £34,000 on your bid to win a seat. You have to take time off work, hit the doorsteps, print the leaflets, put down your deposit, keep up with the local politics, while maintaining your primary career in case you lose. The job security is variable at best, and tied to the fortunes of your wider party – including factors which have absolutely nothing to do with you.

And even if you have a strong motivation to serve the public good, there are better paying options available. You could be a director in a local council. You could work for an NGO. Work in the civil service. Become a lawyer and take on pro bono cases. All of these would give you that pleasant sense of making a difference, while leaving your wallet far heavier. And each of them would come with a second huge advantage: generally speaking, if you take up these careers then you will not – as an individual – have to deal with the British press.

For all that our newspapers pride themselves on their fearless reporting, quite a lot of what they do could be classed as ‘spirited attempts to destroy the personal lives of political opponents’. If you work in a bank, you are unlikely to see the sort of treatment meted out to Chuka Umunna, who saw his grandmother doorstepped when he considered running for Labour leader, or Carrie Symonds – whose fling with Boris Johnson saw her traduced on the front pages. Even better, you don’t have to deal with the toxic work culture: the archaic whip system, the bullying, and the backstabbing needed to climb the greasy pole.

And this is where the cycle begins. When Parliament pays poorly and is an unpleasant place to work, it implicitly selects for people with a strong intrinsic motive to undertake that work. In turn, this often means highly partisan views about how the world should be. People who probably don’t play nicely with people holding different views. And people who make the idea of choosing a different career far more enticing.

The end result is that Parliament is increasingly filled with Boris Johnsons and Chris Graylings; power hungry public schoolboys, and mediocrities with strong views. And the bad currency drives out the good.

The kicker is that just as debasement of currency can eventually trigger a financial crisis, the debasement of parliament can trigger a political crisis. Highly partisan mediocrities are the type of politician most likely to launch grand schemes to reinvent the country – and also the type least capable of seeing such a scheme through.

Remind you of anything?

Header image courtesy of patternghosts, used under a creative commons license.

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